Eminem’s Spin Magazine Cover (PHOTOS)

Wrought with none of the manic playfulness that many of his chart-toppers possess, Eminem‘s picture on the August 2010 issue of SPIN Magazine depicts the rapper up close and personal. In an candid interview with Jonah Weiner, Em takes a trip down memory lane — both literally and figuratively. The 37-year-old rapper mentions his almost-regular trips down 19946 Dresden Street just to see his childhood home, a setting that has influenced so many of his rhymes, and represents his earliest struggles. As Weiner wrote, ‘He made his name, foremost, as a fighter, as a threat, as an irritant — battling for acceptance as a white MC, railing against censorious parents’ groups and pundits, lashing out viciously against everyone from his mother to George W. Bush to ‘N Sync.’For a man who pushed himself into the limelight by calling out anyone he could touch, the hardest part was running out of people criticize, and criticizing the man he said he saw he had become. Recovery, Marshall Mathers’ seventh album, is about his journey back from the brink, about his anxieties, addictions, and fears, and finally fully cleaning out his closet.

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‘I’ll go back and remember, like, fuck, man, how life was back then. How much of a struggle it was. As time goes by, you might get content and forget things.’